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Tomato vs. Dodder, or When Parasitic Plants Attack

At all points in their lives, plants are faced with a variety of potential attackers. Pathogenic organisms like fungi, bacteria, and viruses threaten to infect them with diseases. Herbivores from all walks of life swoop in to devour them. For this reason, plants have developed numerous mechanisms to defend themselves against threats both organismal and environmental. But what if the attacker is a fellow plant? Plants parasitizing other plants? It sounds egregious, but it’s a real thing. And since it’s been going on for thousands of years, certain plants have developed defenses against even this particular threat.

Species of parasitic plants number in the thousands, spanning more than 20 different plant families. One well known group of parasitic plants is in the genus Cuscuta, commonly known as dodder. There are about 200 species of dodder located throughout the world, with the largest concentrations found in tropical and subtropical areas. Dodders generally have thread-like, yellow to orange, leafless stems. They are almost entirely non-photosynthetic and rely on their host plants for water and nutrients. Their tiny seeds can lie dormant in the soil for a decade or more. After germination, dodders have only a few days to find host plants to wrap themselves around, after which their rudimentary roots wither up. Once they find suitable plants, dodders form adventitious roots with haustoria that grow into the stems of their host plants and facilitate uptake of water and nutrients from their vascular tissues.

Some plants are able to fend off dodder. One such instance is the cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) and its resistance to the dodder species, Cuscuta reflexa. Researchers in Germany were able to determine one of the mechanisms tomato plants use to deter dodder; their findings were published in a July 2016 issue of Science. The researchers hypothesized that S. lycopersicum was employing a similar tactic to that of a microbial invasion. That is, an immune response is triggered when a specialized protein known as a pattern recognition receptor (PRP) reacts with a molecule produced by the invader known as a microbe-associated molecular pattern (MAMP). A series of experiments led the researchers to determine that this was, in fact, the case.

The MAMP was given the name Cuscuta factor and was found “present in all parts of C. reflexa, including shoot tips, stems, haustoria, and, at lower levels, in flowers.” The PRP in the tomato plant, which was given the name Cuscuta receptor 1 (or CuRe 1), reacts with the Cuscuta factor, triggering a response that prohibits C. reflexa access to its vascular tissues. Starved for nutrients, the dodder perishes. When the gene that codes for CuRe 1 was inserted into the DNA of Solanum pennellii (a wild relative of the cultivated tomato) and Nicotiana benthamiana (a relative of tobacco and a species in the same family as tomato), these plants “exhibited increased resistance to C. reflexa infestation.” Because these transgenic lines did not exhibit full resitance to the dodder attack, the researchers concluded that “immunity against C. reflexa in tomato may be a process with layers additional to CuRe 1.”

A slew of crop plants are vulnerable to dodder and other parasitic plants, so determining the mechanisms behind resistance to parasitic plant attacks is important, especially since such infestations are so difficult to control, have the potential to cause great economic damage, and are also a means by which pathogens are spread. It is possible that equivalents to CuRe 1 exist in other plants that exhibit resistance to parasitic plants, along with other yet to be discovered mechanisms involved in such resistance, so further studies are necessary. Discoveries like this not only help us make improvements to the plants we depend on for food, but also give us a greater understanding about plant physiology, evolutionary ecology, and the remarkable ways that plants associate with one another.